There are thousands of processes involving the use of conveyors throughout the world. Associated with the use of conveying systems is the need for a simple, easily maintainable, highly reliable, intelligent system, that will, within reasonable limits, monitor gradation variations of a material or product after it has gone through a process, such as rock crushing.
Designing a system to monitor and generate the entire gradation spectrum of a controlled product "on-the-fly" would be extremely involved and complex, maintenance intensive and very costly. Most processing facilities maintain quality control technicians who periodically sample the material to verify output product against a known standard. However, there is a need for an apparatus that will monitor the product between scheduled sample periods. It is, therefore, an extremely useful complement to the existing quality control scheme in the monitoring of conveyed products, enabling the user to view and identify reasonable variations in the gradation of the controlled products when compared to a reference sample and assist in the identification of the materials or products.